1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for bump inspection in which images of respective bumps formed on electrode pads on a semiconductor bare chip are acquired, and the acquired images are processed for inspection of the formation states of the respective bumps. The present invention further relates to a bump formation method and an IC component mounting method using such a bump inspection method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, various inspection methods for respective bumps on this kind of semiconductor bare chips, i.e., IC components, are known. For example, there is an inspection method in which respective bumps are formed on each bump-formation surface of a plurality of IC components, and directly thereafter images showing the formation states of the respective bump are picked up, and the respective images are processed for inspection of the formation state of the respective bumps (see, e.g., Japanese unexamined patent publication No. H10-242219 A).
A description will be given of such a conventional inspection method. A single IC component is taken out of a plurality of IC components stored in a component tray, and is moved to a bump-formation position. A plurality of bumps are formed on the bump-formation surface of the IC component disposed in the bump-formation position.
Then, the IC component having bumps formed thereon is moved to an image-pickup position in which image pickup is performed for inspection of the bumps. In the image-pickup position, an image-pickup camera and a single bump on the IC component is aligned and an image of the single bump is picked up by the image-pickup camera. Then, on the IC component, the next bump and the image-pickup camera are aligned and an image of the next bump is picked up. In similar procedures, images of the respective bumps are picked up.
After that, recognition processing of the respective picked-up images is performed so that the formation positions of the respective bumps are inspected, and based on the result of the inspection, the quality of the formation states of the respective bumps is determined.